Abstract
Reentry and entry vehicles flying through the earth's atmosphere or other planet's atmosphere confront severe aerodynamic heating. The severe heat flux, the complicated functional requirements due to small weight budget often impose several engineering challenges on designing of the thermal protection system (TPS) of the capsule. The key technologies related to designing of TPS of reentry capsules are summarized introducing design results of the MUSES-C reentry capsule in this paper. The chief points of these challenges are estimation of the aerodynamic heating environment and a prediction of the behavior of the thermal protection material in the flight environment. Ablation analysis code has been developed taking account of the pyrolysis gas effect and verified on the basis of heating test data in the arc wind tunnel. For slow descending by the means of parachute deployment, the sealing between components to be separated needs to be considered as a part of TPS.
